Beauty and beastliness

When you think of Nature, you imagine sunsets and trees, flowers and pretty birds. But there’s no getting away from natural ugliness. From the hideous toad to the pig with his little piggy eyes and strange snout, nature is filled with all that’s obscene, repugnant, frightening, abject and monstrous.

Why is a bird so pretty and a frog so ugly?

There are those who say that ugliness, like beauty, also lies in the eyes of the beholder, and says more about you than the creature you behold.

Ask a toad what is beauty, true beauty, says Voltaire. He will tell you that it consists of his mate, with her two fine round eyes protruding from her small head, her broad flat throat.

Ask such a frog to sing and surely it will croak (like Dylan) something on the lines of: There's beauty in the silver, singing river,/There's beauty in the sunrise in the sky,/But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty/That I remember in my true love's eyes.

Fair is foul and foul is fair, as the three witches cried.

In the evolutionary scheme of things, beauty is said to be simply nature’s strategy to help attract one of the opposite sex and so perpetuate genes.

The experts say ugliness, likewise, is nothing but a deliberate strategy. The very features we find grotesque are vital for the animal’s survival.

There is a purpose behind the pig’s little piggy eyes and snout, mysterious though it might seem.

Unhappily it doesn’t seem to help the poor little pig. It still gets eaten by humans who, while calling it dirty and greedy, find much to praise when it arrives on the table as bacon,sausage and salami. Mmm, beautiful.